What is information processing?

Information processing is a framework used to explain and describe mental processes, and its roots are in cognitive psychology (Steffe & Gale, 1995). Simply, “how does our mind interpret the world around us, from the fascinating to the mundane?” If we understand how the mind works, we can improve its abilities or improve ourselves and the world around us. For example, take reading this text, you may not be realizing it, but your mind is doing a million processes at once to interpret and understand while you are reading it. You don’t even say, “mind start reading!”– you just start reading.

Information processing has two elements (1) the content or formation of cognitions as mental representations and (2) the activity and use of cognitive mental representations (Mayer, 1999).  Using the reading example again, your mind forms the mental representation in your head and activates it to understand the contents in relation to others.

Mental representations are not actual images and activate differently. You can’t draw them out easily and you don’t have voice commands to understand them. However, we try to add easily understood representations of information processing by incorporating heuristics (shortcuts) and theories. You can’t honestly believe we would have you memorize the entire physiology and neural chemistry of the brain. It would be impossible as your brain interacts in its environment differently per person. You are not stagnating.

Two predominant theories came our originally to interpret and understand information processing. (1) Associationist View — strengthening of pathways– by how much you do it over and over again. (2) Gestalt View– the building of idea– the more information you take the more or a picture you get.

Take riding a bike. In the Associationist View, your brain is building pathways of familiarity and strengthening where certain aspects of your feet should be, where your hands should be for balance, and how to view the road for problems or issues. In the Gestalt View, you are constantly taking more information to build upon prior knowledge. When you ride and fall, you add more information to your brain to correct for it. This may not be the best example for you to understand. If so, please click on a new tab above and Google a better more helpful response. (Trust me I am not offended… I do it for my classes all the time). These theories build upon what we will discuss in another page called: classical view and constructivist view.

Think of a Computer

I would like for you to imagine a computer, smartphone, or tablet. (Probably what you are on to read this information). You interact with your electronic device via external “stuff” (e.g., a screen, keyboard, or speakers). Yet, you can’t understand the processes underneath; you just understand the output. People are similar.

We interact with the world but aren’t understanding what all is going on inside of us. Luckily, information processing is a helpful theory to connect human’s and computers (not through cyborgs). I would offer the same suggestion. Computers and people have working memory and long term memory. Working memory is all the stuff your computer does quickly, and then forgets. Long term memory is the stuff you force it to save. If you save all the working memory stuff, you (like your computer) would fry/ burn up. We take in so much information every second of the day it would be impossible to store it all. Yet, we build upon our long term memory and make easy connections to find and resolve issues quickly.

Here is a video which may help. I use similar words, but I interchange them. Also, I will focus mainly on working/ short-term memory and long-term memory or sensory memory:

Take some time now to process these ideas. Metaphors are throughout.

Why not focus on behaviorism?

Lastly, I know I have taken up a great deal of time for your reading. One last thing on behaviorism. If you are familiar with this idea, you may wonder what the difference may exist. For those not familiar with behaviorism is the learning through repeated positive and negative reinforcements or punishments in response to actions (Bargh & Ferugson, 2000). Many researchers prefer behaviorism for its simplicity, but many researchers argue cognitive theories (information processing) goes beyond by incorporating the mental and metacognition of the actions we take (Miller, 2003). “Cognitivism also attempts to go beyond behaviorism by attempting to explain how humans reason, make decisions, why they make errors, how they remember and misremember, in other words, things that are very much part of the human experience but cannot be explained by behavior alone” (Atkisson, 2010).

Classical behaviorism may be great for instilling behaviors for how to take a test, but cognitive theory asks why do I want to take this test.